Collection of Margaret Wheatley Clayton |
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via email from Rich Clayton, 9-14-06 The photo album consists of the tattered remains of a book called "The Girl Graduate, Her Own Book" and was apparently intended to be filled by a high school girl with mementos of her senior year. My grandmother, Margaret Wheatley, had a few school related items in it, but mostly the kind of personal photos that you might expect of a school girl who had brothers in the military in various locations in the US and overseas in WWI. (My grandmother was about 17 or 18 at the time.) There are pictures of her, her sisters, and her friends, and pictures of her brothers in uniform, and of their comrades. |
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| Some photos of the boys appear to be at stateside bases; others are labeled as being in Europe. One page fragment has two small pictures labeled "Arthur Starbuck", and another labeled "Mike Lackey" (I think) of a young man sitting on top of a biplane. I haven't been able to find any info on Lackey, but it's a nice picture. Can you identify the aircraft? |
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in Texas |
| Another page has two interesting photos. One large group shot is labeled "Part of the Souther Field Bunch in Texas". |
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Pitts Mark |
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The other is of a smaller group, with first names labeled, including an "Arthur". This same fellow appears in the larger group shot (front
row, 4th from left), and seems close in appearance to the subject of the "Arthur Starbuck" photos. As you may be aware (but I was not),
Souther Field was a WWI flight training center
located in Americus, GA which was where my grandmother and her brothers lived. I'm not certain, but I think the family connection
to Mr. Starbuck is my grandmother's brother Cliff Wheatley. Cliff served in France in WWI, where he suffered lung injuries from a poison gas attack. After the war he was a sports editor and writer for the Atlanta Constitution, and is credited by the University of Georgia, along with another writer from the Atlanta Journal, with having originated the name "Georgia Bulldogs" for the UGA mascot in a column on Nov. 6, 1920. He died in 1925 at the age of 28, of complications from the wartime gas attack. |
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I think Cliff may be seated to the right of "Arthur" in the
"Souther Field Bunch" photo (front row, 5th from left). I've asked my sister to email me some more photos of Cliff for comparison. You may wonder how I came to find your website and its entry for Arthur Starbuck. I was scanning the pages of my grandmother's photo book, to preserve the images electronically before the book falls apart completely, when I came across the page with Mike Lackey and Arthur Starbuck. Had it been any other name I probably would have gone right on to the next page. Having never heard or seen the name Starbuck in any context besides a coffee shop or a Battlestar Galactica character, it caught my eye and on a whim I googled it. The first things to pop up were your site and two other references to post WWI aviation. I can't say with certainty this is the same Arthur Starbuck, but it seems plausible, if not likely. |
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